Howdy pilots! We’ll post a regular weekly update for you tomorrow, but before we get to that, i wanted to share our plans for October with you. We are still not ready for a full fledged beta, but we don’t just want to keep doing the same old Friendly Friday events, so we’ve decided to shake things up a bit! 🙂
During the first week of October, we will wipe everyone’s alpha accounts. You will keep the classes you have unlocked (and the Gold Assault skin if you previously unlocked that) but all planes, inventory and pilots levels will be scoured away! This will put everyone on a level playing field for October 6, which is the first Friday in the month of October and that will mark the beginning of our first Alpha Competition.
During the competition we will be closely tracking every players’ activity. At the end of October we will sum up the activity from all the Friday playtests and award prizes to players who top the following charts:
- Total damage inflicted against Meowza (summed across all battles.)
- Fastest to reach level 20 *without* ever equipping an item that was received from another player, or from storage, etc.
- Inflicted at least 5% of the total damage to a Meowza while also taking the least amount of damage during that encounter.
- Killed the most setpiece bosses in the palace and mountain regions, in total
- Killed the most group leaders in the City territory, in a row, without taking any damage. (The “group leaders” are: Crowd Control, Secret Police and City Officer.)
- “Greatest effort” (this is in part a function of total hours played, but it isn’t *just* hours, and we’re not going to tell you more than that because we don’t want anyone trying to exploit the system. Suffice to say, we’ll be watching for folks who genuinely put in the time and try to give awesome feedback, among other things!)
We’re open to other metrics that don’t result in seriously degenerate or unusual play behaviors during Friendly Fridays – please do feel free to suggest any you think would be cool.
The top player in each category will receive a permanent free hangar slot and will have a powerful weapon or item named after them, as a perpetual acknowledgment of their glorious achievement! 2nd through 5th place in each category will also receive a permanent free hangar slot. 6th through 10th place will get an honorable mention. Everyone from 1st to 10th place will also receive a Steam key + whitelist that they can gift to anyone they like! And of course, we will be recording the winners and memorializing them somewhere on Steambirds.com and/or forums.
So all that said, you’ve got two Fridays left (this one and next one) to enjoy the glorious planes and pilots that you’ve been building up all these months. Feel free to play reckless and go out in a blaze of glory! 😉